1Bound to your place those penultimate daysWhose plot was impenetrable –– Myth-full,Dawn-pallid …– Life’s end a whisper summons its start:“I will not render you – no! I will raise you! …”

2Bound to your place, those days so penultimateOnce when you mirrored – each moment, each moment –That lyre that Orpheus lent us,Whose force like a missile struggles with song,And its four strings commune withEach, striking each other,By twos – and by twos –A murmur slipping toward silence:“Did he beginTo pound out a note? …Of what sound was he Maestro! whose playing’s repelling? …”

4What in that, in what you have played, and then what? –A first note recited – and what? he’ll express itHowever its echoes set themselves up, will be differentFrom when with your own hand you blessedEvery chord –And played it through, simpleAnd perfect like Pericles,Like a virtue drawn from a deep past,Set foot in a village, a log cabin home,Told herself as she entered:I was reborn in heaven,Whose gate changed into my harp,A ribbon – a path …Where the Host – I could spy through pale wheatblades –Emanuel he who now dwellsOn Mount Tabor!

6And – now – you’ve ended the song – And INo longer can see you – only – can hearHearing what? – like when boys battle boys –– The keys still resistingThe source of their yearnings unsungThey softly push back on their ownBy eighths – then by fifths –And murmuring: “He – has he started to play?Or uncaring – cast us aside?”

9Look! … from alley to alleyCaucasian horses break forthLike swallows ahead of a storm,Ahead of their regiments, darting,By hundreds – by hundreds –– The town house caught fire, died down,Then flared up again – And there – Under the wallSaw the foreheads of widows in mourningPushed back by rifle butts –And again, smokeblinded, I saw,As it moved past the portal, the pillars,A contraption that looked like a coffinThey were heaving out … crashing and crushing – your piano!

10That one! … that championed Poland, he from the heightsAll-Perfections of historyPeople-bound, anthem ecstatic –O Poland – of wheelwrights transformed;That same one – crushed on the granite squares!– Over there: as the thoughts of the just manAre drowned in the popular angerOr as, from age unto age,All its angers awaken!And right there – like Orpheus’ body,A thousand nailed passions tear him to shredsAnd each one howling: “Not me! …Not me!” – with a clatter and chatter of teeth –– ––Is it you? – is it me? – then let’s strike up a Judgment Day song,Urge them on: “Rejoice, o you child who will be! …With groaning – stories gone deaf:The Ideal – now brought low on the pavement” –– ––

Translation from Polish by Jerome Rothenberg & Arie GallesCOMMENTARY

with Jeffrey C. Robinson

All things in this world become beautiful in their patterning after a beauty of a higher order, after non-material beauty. Only when they attain the metaphysical grounding, do they attain their own real being - an infused spiritual beauty, a beauty infused by God. In this manner then, aesthetic beauty becomes fused with moral beauty, with Goodness, with Good itself. ( C.N.)

(1) In the search for which, Norwid (1821-1883) developed a complex surface in his poems – hard to conceive for those of us cut off from him by language – whose darkness, verging on a self-proclaimed obscurity (sancta obscuritas he called it), brought him ineluctably to a new knowledge & practice of reality. If that was his goal, the means he used involved a panoply of what the twentieth-century Russian (Chuvash) poet Gennady Aygi called Norwid’s “poetry of sound,” or Czeslaw Milosz: “the impenetrable obscurity of his style and his jarring syntax, until no one would publish him.” Writes Danuta Zamojska-Hutchins of the range displayed here: “Latinizing syntax, ellipses, foreign language infusions, multiple neologisms, twisted sentences often contrary to the grammar of the Polish language, the use of inversions and punctuation antics, but, above all, variations of the morphological and syntactic functions, the exploitation of the rhythmophonic and expressive qualities of language , all of these are the key emblems of Norwid's poetics of darkness.” (Italics ours.) But the attempt here, in a line from the Romantics to the present, was not only to make the writing new, but to renew the language – or language itself – by repeated & precise acts of defamiliarization, & through that altered, often nonabsorptive language to renew our image of the world. A poet of “Socratic Christliness,” as Bogdan Czaykowski names him, “he thought of himself as a reader of signs, of traces left by God for human beings to recognize and decipher.”

The comparison to Hopkins, often made, seems to hold true on many levels.

(2) Like other Polish Romantic artists including Adam Mickiewicz, Norwid – poet, dramatist, painter, sculptor – spent a life in voluntary exile, a Polish nationalist at a distance, leaving Poland at 21, wandering through Europe & even the U.S., settling at length in Paris where he died in poverty. In that Paris milieu, however, he became an intimate of Frederic Chopin, who fulfilled for him the definition of a modern artist – Norwid wrote about him in at least three pieces – totally absorbed in the lyric “perfection” of the composer’s work which nonetheless, he thought, “voiced Poland,” vulnerable to contemporary brutality yet impervious to it over time. And his remarkable free-verse experiment “Chopin’s Piano,” presented here, dramatizes the impinging turbulence that modifies but does not destroy Chopin’s music as his piano is (actually was) hurled to the Warsaw streets by the army of the Russian Tsar. Little of Norwid’s poetry appeared during his lifetime; indeed, scholars published the complete edition of his poems only in 1962.

[From Poems for the Millennium, Volume 3:The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry, scheduled for publication in January 2009. For further information check the following URL: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10540.php. Earlier excerpts from Volume 3 appeared on June 11, June 18, June 24, July 6, July 13, July 21, July 29, August 7. August 16, & September 7.]

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